The Journal de Montréal has started a possibly satirical “Centre d’observation du Québec-Bashing“, and has discovered J.J. McCullough, who for some reason keeps getting published in the Washington Post.

TVA Nouvelles has finally apologized — almost a year later — for a story it ran that accused a mosque of demanding that women be excluded from a nearby construction site. That turned out to be false after an investigation that TVA has not released.

Montreal Gazette editor Basem Boshra (my boss) apologized after its website posted a story from American Media Inc. (originally from Radar Online) about a “Tinder Horror Date” who stabbed a woman and was tased by police, later dying because of it. A lot of people on Twitter criticized the headline and tweets about the story for portraying the attacker as the victim or being apparently flippant about a Tinder date that left a woman seriously injured. (Boshra offers some subsequent advice for editors apologizing for screwups).

Corus was not swayed by a few people arguing against its proposal to shut down 44 Global TV transmitters in an application to reallocate tangible benefits to other projects. “Some intervenors have mistakenly characterized this as an application for approval to decommission the re-transmitters. … To be clear: Corus has exercised its discretion to decommission the re-transmitters in question, it is prepared to forego certain regulatory privileges as a result, and it is applying only for authorization to reallocate the remaining tangible benefits associated with those re-transmitters.” It made only a slight change to the application, reallocating $250,000 from the Canadian Media Producers Association to the Canada Media Fund after the CMPA declined the offer.

Low-power community TV station CFTV-TV Leamington, Ont., also got a licence renewal, until 2021, with serious concerns raised about licence compliance — Canadian programming, local programming and filing of annual returns.

The commission has given Northern Native Broadcasting a one-year extension, to June 2020, to launch its Indigenous radio station in Vancouver. The FM station (106.3 MHz, 9,000W) will use the callsign CJNY-FM. This is one of the five urban Indigenous stations that were authorized to replace the defunct Aboriginal Voices Radio.

The commission has given the green light to implement automatic blocking of telephone calls that have “blatantly illegitimate” caller IDs (like 000-000-0000 or other undialable numbers, or the same number as the recipient). Unfortunately this won’t block a lot of nuisance calls these days, that have legitimate-looking IDs, often using the same prefix as the recipient to make it seem like a call from the same neighbourhood.

Remember when Luc Lavoie went on LCN and made a joke about shooting separatists? The press council finally got around to looking at that, and surprise, they constituted discriminatory comments. The council found that TVA did its job as a broadcaster by apologizing afterward and ensuring the comment was not rebroadcast.

A Radio-Canada online story about a police presence at a Chambly city council meeting was not sensationalist and accurately reflected the article.

Meanwhile, a campaign to get the ads for the program (which had more than 3.3 million viewers) given a Super Bowl-like treatment was pretty successful, in that many creative spots were created for this broadcast. The ads are posted online. (That’s not to say the ads are particularly good, but they at least put in some effort.)

Videotron has settled its dispute with Bell Media over the distribution of Crave, and Bell has dropped its lawsuit. The good news is that Videotron subscribers to the Crave TV service (formerly The Movie Network) now have access to the whole Crave library from crave.ca. The bad news is that the price of Crave on Videotron has gone up, from $15 to $20 a month, and it can no longer be included free in build-your-own packages with the “premium” option. Super Écran is also up, from $15 to $17 a month.

Radio

Aaron and Tasso had lunch. The photo of the two former Q92 morning men hitting social media resulted in a lot of feedback hoping for a more permanent reunion. Aaron Rand says they might do a Facebook Live or something.

Stingray is also rebranding two radio stations to The Breeze: CKRA-FM 96.3 in Edmonton (formerly Capital 96.3) and CHLG-FM 104.3 in Vancouver (formerly LG 104.3). Both were formerly classic hits stations and will essentially remain so, but with a more relaxed feel, with “artists like Lionel Richie, Elton John, Ed Sheeran, Whitney Houston, Sara McLachlan, Billy Joel, and Adele.”

Online

Movies

The director of the critically mocked Papa est devenu un lutin, a movie played exclusively in a few Guzzo cinemas, published a press release and a YouTube video (since deleted) in which he defended his movie as one made for children, not adult critics, and saying among other things that “Si vous aimez des films comme Maman, j’ai raté l’avion, c’est un film pour vous. Allez voir mon film, vous allez l’adorer.” Critics may disagree that his movie can be compared to Home Alone. The movie has made a few thousand dollars from those cinemas.

Telecom

Work to add wireless connectivity in the Montreal metro has completed on the Blue Line, meaning three of the four lines are now on wireless networks for the four major carriers from one end to the other. The remaining line, the Green Line, will be connected in 2019-20, starting on the eastern side.

News about people

Back home from doing this in Nepal and back on the air tonight on @CBCMontreal at 6, just in time for holiday mode! Hope you’ll tune in to see how I get through the show with jet lag! Thanks to @cbc_nancywood for filling in for the last month. pic.twitter.com/HN90yZosds

Good reads

The Washington Post on the impact of lockdowns on students in U.S. schools, even when there’s no real shooting. The story required reviewing thousands of news stories and other reports to get data, which led to an interesting finding that such lockdowns tend to get reported more in smaller cities than larger ones (probably because violence is less common in those areas and community media more prevalent, but those communities will also tend to be whiter).